American Pietàs: Visions of Race, Death and the Maternal

In a lecture based on her recently published book, Ruby C. Tapia will discuss how a range of 21st century visual representations of death conjoined to the maternal reflect and produce racialized citizenship. By means of a sustained engagement with Roland Barthes's suturing of race, death and the maternal in Camera Lucida, American Pietàs contends that the contradictory and generative essence of the photograph is both as a signifier of death and a guarantor of resurrection.

Tapia's study explores the implications of this argument for maternal representations in the context of specific visual cultural moments: the photojournalistic documentation of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina; the commemoration of Princess Diana in U.S. Magazines; the intertext of Toni Morrison's and Hollywood's Beloved; the social and cultural death in teen pregnancy, imaged and regulated in California's Partnership for Responsible Parenting campaigns; and popular constructions of the "Widows of 9/11" in print and televisual journalism.

Her talk will provide an overview of how her book treats these seemingly disparate texts as visual nodes in a larger network of racialized discourses of national death and remembering, focusing at length on a long history of both well known and lesser known pietas that are distinctly "American" if not in title, then in literal form and racially figured national substance.